TLS Gene-eyed The ‘secret of life’ isn’t reducible to DNA Review by Johnjoe McFadden HOW LIFE WORKS A user’s guide to the new biology PHILIP BALL 560pp. Picador. £22. PHILIP BALL’S NEW BOOK opens on June 26, 2000, the day President Bill Clinton announced the completion of the first-draft sequence of the genome of a single human. At the time, it was hoped that this would usher in a new era of gene-targeted medicines – magic bullets to shoot down cancer or diabetes. The hope was misplaced. More than two decades later, we are still waiting for these revolutionary therapies. Hundreds of thousands of genomes have now been sequenced, but hardly any medical advances have been developed as a consequence. Why did the genome fail to deliver? The answer is that life turned out to be more complicated than the sequencing pioneers imagined. A conceptual earthquake has radically shifted the gene paradigm underpinning biology since the early twentieth century, and facing up to the “new biology” of this book’s subtitle requires “a shift in the notion of what life … is”. Ball is a former editor of Nature and, though a physicist himself, has read a lot of biology papers. He admires those biologists who have managed to “wrestle any insights at all into what living matter is and how it sustains itself ”. The experience has nevertheless filled him with misgivings about the process by which the science of “genes, cells, evolution and us” passes beyond the reach of academic journals into public discourse, where it is too often “dangerously simplistic and out of kilter with what we know”. Ball aims to address these shortcomings with a new vision of biology. more at link Online at Readly - requires free sign up to read whole article: https://gb.readly.com/magazines/the-tls/2024-01-19/65a748b488b8603945ec14a0
Also reviewed in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ks-by-philip-ball-review-the-magic-of-biology
What I have managed to read of McFadden's review and the whole of the Guardian review leave me with no idea what this book is supposed to be saying. In fact masses of new treatments have come from discovering genes. It is just that most of the important genes were discovered individually before 2000. The genome project - to sequence the whole thing in one go - was never likely to achieve very much other than maybe tidying up the finding of the genes that had been missed
It feels pretty normal that it has failed to deliver considering that we pretty much only understand the parts of the genome that code for proteins. The belief is no longer that most DNA is 'junk', but obviously the plans for an organism have to be part of the genetic code, and we understand nothing about that. It's like having 1% of the source code for a computer system, and only some parts that relate to one aspect of it. Of course that's not nearly enough to be revolutionary. So much more work left to do before we can effectively apply this outside of very specific cases about protein coding.
But the argument seems to be that it failed to deliver drugs targeting protein coding genes. And that was just because most of the genes had already been identified. There are scores of monoclonals targeting proteins and scores of kinase inhibitors targeting proteins. Johnjoe McFadden seems to be suggesting that Ball is talking about some mysterious 'new biology' as if there was some mysterious life force uncovered. Johnjoe tends to go in for things like that so I am wary. I cannot access the full review and the bit one can could mean anything.
